This week's paid update features some classic sense of wonder...
BogiReads brings you the daily speculative reading recommendation of editor Bogi Takács.
Today's recommendation -
I have trouble saving this text, but pls believe that this novelette is great.
Author: Chi Hui, translated by John Chu
Title: “Stars Don’t Dream”
Venue: Clarkesworld, January 2024 (ed. Neil Clarke)
Type: Novelette – 11040 words
Themes: Science fiction, robotics, space travel, AI, VR, literally every classic science fiction theme (but it doesn’t feel like a kitchen sink story at all)
Where to read: Text free online / Subscribe (There is usually an audiobook version too, but they seem to be running slightly behind with production; the January issue is not up yet.)
I just got my January issue of Clarkesworld a few days ago – ever since I’ve been subscribing in print, I usually don’t read the website, because it’s just much more comfortable for me to read in print. (By the way, the print issues have wonderful production values, really recommend subscribing if you like that sort of thing.) I’m not sure why several magazines have been running late, but I’m glad it finally arrived!
This was my favorite story from the issue, and my favorite novelette so far in 2024 overall. It’s one of those large-scale, big-picture stories with classic SFnal sense of wonder, but at the same time I also cared for the characters (which is usually the weakness of this approach). It has a lot of cool ideas that would individually make for solid stories, but all together they create a…. uhhh I would say “tapestry,” but as I learned in my day job teaching college students, “tapestry” is one of ChatGPT’s favorite words, so now I’m avoiding it. Anyway, this novelette offers a portrayal of many different aspects of the future all fitting together.
The characters are living in an empty-seeming, pastoral future where many humans spend their time plugged into VR while exoskeletons exercise their bodies, but they don’t feel satisfied with this inward turn. They decide to team up and terraform Venus. This needs various hacks, piggybacking on existing technologies, micro-fundraising on a large scale, and more. Probably needless to say that even still, it doesn’t go as planned.
Loved it & feel like there will soon be enough stories for a Chi Hui collection in English. She also has another story coming up in Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror ed. Xueting C. Ni, which I’m looking forward to reading too. (Amazon US / Bookshop.org) While I shower you with upcoming books, here is another translated horror anthology that I’m just about to pick up from the library – it’s a brand new title and my hold just came in: Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories, from the same publisher as No Edges that I recently recommended (Amazon US / Bookshop.org).
(Book purchase links are associate links as usual.)
Take care,
Bogi.
PS - I think it would be interesting to read this novelette together with the Strugatsky brothers' novella "Predatory Objects of the Century", but that one probably has a completely different title in English if it's available at all. I need to reread it, because I read it a very long time ago, but some aspects of this story reminded me of it. ...I found it, it's called The Final Circle of Paradise in English and it was translated by Leonid Renen.